42 RENASCENT INDIA

Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928), whose first independent contri-
bution to the sect consisted in the Famine Relief he organized
in the years 1897-1900—"the first time," as he says himself
with justifiable pride,1 "that a non-Christian private agency
started a non-official movement for the relief of distress caused
by famine." This work copied the methods of many Christian
missions and "gathered" large numbers of starving children into
Arya Samajist orphanages, of which those at Ferozepur and
Meerut are large institutions, carrying on their humanitarian
(and proselytizing) work with undiminished zeal and success
to the present day. Lala Munshi Ram declared2 in 1907: "The
Arya Sarnaj in its collective capacity is a sannyasi and therefore
cannot have anything to do with politics"; the fact remains,
that, in the words of Lajpat Rai,3 "the foreign rulers of India
have never been quite happy about the Arya Samaj. They have
always disliked its independence of tone and its propaganda of
self-confidence, self-help and self-reliance. The national side
of its activities has aroused their antipathy." In 1905 Lajpat
Rai accompanied Gokhale to England, to protest against the
various Curzon policies, and from there visited also the United
States. His whole subsequent career is bound up with politics
and will therefore be considered in the second part. At this
point I can sum up the Axya Samaj as a religious force working
for social reform, which remains a great and powerful factor
to this day in the national life of India, and one seriously to be
reckoned with in its future.

THE PRARTHANA SAMAJ

I shall now turn to another group of endeavours, which, neither
as blindly anglicizing as the Brahmo Samaj, nor as violently
indianizing as the Arya Samaj, has rather tended to keep the
golden mean of cool, shrewd common sense, developing the
1 The Arya £zmof, p. 312, * j^id., p. 170 3 Ibid., p, 155.